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The Mail

Letters from our readers.

CONSIDERING CESAR CHAVEZ

Nathan Heller’s article on Cesar Chavez, which relies heavily on “The Crusades of Cesar Chavez,” by Miriam Pawel, is full of half-truths and distortions (“Hunger Artist,” April 14th). Let me, as Chavez’s eldest son, cite just one example: Heller writes that Chavez was “ambivalent” about the Vietnam War and that “he refused to support his son’s conscientious-objector application.” In fact, it was my dad who encouraged me to apply for conscientious-objector status, after we met with a priest to discuss my feelings about the war. My father asked if I was prepared to go to jail, and I said I was. “Then your mother and I will support you,” he said. In 1971, my dad attended my trial, and testified in my defense. (I was acquitted when my attorney proved government misconduct in singling me out because of who my father was.) Heller writes about the “familiar hagiography” surrounding my father. My dad certainly never saw himself as a saint. But if fighting for the rights of farm workers to gain respect, dignity, and a better life makes some people think of him as a saint, then all those who fought by his side should be considered saints, too.

Fernando Chavez

San Jose, Calif.

It was shocking to realize that Heller did not once use the word “nonviolence” in his article on Cesar Chavez. In mentioning Chavez’s fast in 1968, Heller puts the word “penance” in quotation marks, but he does not say why Chavez felt the need to make such a sacrifice. The union was being challenged not just by the growers’ legal maneuverings but also by thugs hired to threaten the strikers. One response by the strikers was to fight back physically. Chavez, fearful that violence would endanger the strikers and their cause, reaffirmed his commitment to nonviolence by fasting. He ended his fast only after receiving pledges of nonviolence from his supporters. Nonviolence was the key not only to how the union won the strike but also to why Chavez and his cause had supporters all over the world. It is the reason Robert Kennedy is sitting next to Chavez in the photograph featured in the article (whose caption is, unfortunately, full of nonsense about Chavez’s personality flaws). Chavez’s insistence on nonviolence was perhaps the most significant thing about him, and it is what made him the American hero that Heller admits he was—yet Heller misses that point entirely.

Elisabeth A. Miller

Providence, R.I.

CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

I read with interest Philip Gourevitch’s essay about commemorating the genocide in Rwanda (Comment, April 21st). In the spring of 1997, I travelled to Tanzania to observe the prosecution of Jean-Paul Akayesu, who had been the mayor of the Rwandan town of Taba during the genocide. I was overseeing a research project on behalf of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Akayesu was charged with ordering or allowing to take place (and in some cases being present for) the killing of Tutsi civilians and the rape of Tutsi women held in Taba’s cultural center. (In the course of a hundred days, as many as half a million women and girls nationwide were raped, sexually mutilated, and/or murdered.) The verdict, handed down in September, 1998, was not only the first international conviction for genocide but also the first to recognize rape and sexual violence as constitutive acts of genocide, and the first to broaden the definition of sexual violence to include, in addition to rape, nonphysical acts such as intimidation and extortion. Judge Navi Pillay, now the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said after the verdict, “From time immemorial, rape has been regarded as the spoils of war. Now it will be considered a war crime. We want to send out a strong message that rape is no longer a trophy of war.”